Speaking English

What had changed my character from being that of a peaceful conservative, to someone who was now prepared to defend herself at almost any cost? I didn’t really understand it too much, initially. I was prepared to acknowledge that I might have “brought something on myself” by being too uninformed and therefore somehow morally lacking, by a conservative-minded person’s reckoning. And yet, I had a deeper abiding sense that I had been treated most unjustly, brought to my knees for probably quite trivial “offences” which had not sufficiently been detailed to me. I was confused, then, and in two minds as to the real causes of my low morale. In the end, I decided that I had to go with what my gut was telling me: I had merely been badly treated. Yet, my conservative mind still clamored and endeavoured to find “something wrong” – just so that I might manage to redeem myself through a long process of spiritual self-amelioration.

As the two forces of my personality – gut level honesty and the desire for self-redemption – battled it out, I began two levels of research. One: I looked into my “gut” with a desire to determine what was there. It sounds strange, but I wanted to know who I was, and how I got myself into a situation where I could be a victim of workplace bullying. Was I, as the conservatives I’d interacted with suggested, merely thin-skinned, and imagining the effects of bullying in my mind? There is a certain stereotype, of which I’ve smelled a whiff, every so often, which says that white women from Africa are notoriously delicate and spoiled as a result of having had black servants. Maybe that sort of person was me? It didn’t feel as if this was me, at the gut level, but maybe there was something wrong with my gut level feelings, and I’d overlooked something important at a more cerebral level – something for which I would justly deserve strong punishments, such as the ones I had received. I had very much been picked on, and this couldn’t have come about unless I had overlooked something important about my environment, perhaps totally misunderstanding its dynamic.

My conservative side was insistent that I not leave myself at sea, with a profound sense of accumulated mediocrity. I had to know more. I had to understand what I’d done wrong, in order to prevent myself from making the same, agonising mistakes.

And, at the same time, maybe what had harmed me had been caused by some historical factors of which I was still not fully cognisant? My undergraduate degree, as incomplete as it was in terms of real intellectual training, had given me enough insight to understand as well as to implicitly expect that “history” has its own force of determination, pushing it along, and that, as “individuals” we are, to some degree, bound to find ourselves placed as its victims.

I was determined not to be the victim of that impersonal force – history. But, in order to avoid that role, I needed to understand any dynamic that might be “working” on me. I already had a gut level sense that the was a force of racial antagonism – something I had experienced on my first day at work, when one employee expressed her disdain that I was from Zimbabwe. Notably, she hadn’t expressed this directly to me, but to her colleague on the phone, and loudly enough to make sure I heard her side of the phone conversation.

As I was working at a left wing organisation, it should have employed real “Australians” , not what seemed very much on the surface to be  a right winger:  me! It had obviously been a mistake to put my place of birth on my resume, but I would have been asked about that anyway, as most people could tell I spoke with a different accent. All the same, I had not considered myself out of place working for this organisation, as most of my undergraduate study had given me a sense that leftism was something I could very easily accommodate.

But, maybe this was wrong? One of my first thoughts when I began to do the intellectual postmortem on what had gone wrong with my behaviour or with the situation, not to mention the whole dynamic of this workplace, was “maybe I was lulled into a false sense of security by the left-leaning tendencies of Academia?” This thought constantly irritated me, compelling me to think that I’d been sent into a hive of hornets, understanding neither my self nor my world, sufficiently, and without any ability for self defence. At least, I considered, those on the right had always understood the necessity for various forms of self defence or attack. I had been duped out of this understanding, since nothing like this had been carefully suggested to me – not as an undergraduate.

Now that I was “enlightened” by the impartial treatment I'd received, I would become a patriot for my country of origin’s lost cause. I had to return to my origins – to the originative cause of my existence, in order to be ‘safe’ again. Above all, I thought that I had to become self-aware of those things that I might be punished for, in order to defend myself decisively next time, without the confusion of not expecting psychological combat, and without the distraction of self doubt.

My parents’ relentless anti-intellectual stance made up a large part of the force which changed my mind, again. As I sat in the home office, day by day, trying to find the answers to my questions regarding being a more intelligent and reliable citizen, my parents became increasingly anxious. I was paying them rent to stay there, in the home in which I had been brought up. I was an adult – so my persistent endeavours should not have provoked their censure. Yet, quite shockingly for me, it did. There’s no doubt that during my time of stay with them I might have seemed unhappy. My digestive system had all but completely broken down, due to the unnecessary workplace hassles. Yet, psychologically, I was a bloodhound, leading the charge to find some answers to some previously unanswered questions. And on an intellectual level, I was more than happy in my newfound, newly re-found, intellectual element. It was strange to me how little this reality of mine would be respected.

One person’s meat is another person’s poison, (she said, ironically), and it must have appeared that my reading of books, and doing investigation, day after day, was slowly poisoning me. Actually, this intellectual engagement, whilst I waited for my body to recover, was nothing short of a complete, holistic lifeline for me. Still, individuals see things in different ways depending on their social conditioning – ( I know that now!) Whatever education I’d had, my parents hadn’t had the same or similar. So, they saw me as evil or engaged in evil, and requiring forced redemption. Their view was that I had to be pointed explicitly towards the sight of my pathetic self, in order to perceive that I was enormously pathetic, by which sight I’d be redeemed somehow, making me different from before I’d had this insight.

One problem: I was not inclined to understand my situation, mired down as it was by my physical rundown-ness, as genuinely “pathetic”. Rather, I perceived it as “unfortunate” as well as being the probable product of a unfairness (the source of which I hadn’t thoroughly determined, yet – but was about to do.)

I was to discover, then, and quite belatedly, the plight of the Rhodesian blacks. This took place through a particular process, whereby my father set out to demonstrate to me (in order to reveal to me the plight, in his eyes, of my own pathetic-ness). I was to discover, for example, that my slurring of a word, because my eyes were popping out of my head, at the unfairness of this, parental coercion – this slurring of a word – the word was “sentinel” – was actually to be taken as a sign. Indeed, it was to be taken as a sign in what was somehow an “objective” arena of public discussion, which, I myself, ought to be persuaded by, and taken in by. There I was, under extreme emotional duress, my parents pressing me to hear me admit how awful and “disgusting” I was. There they were, propelled by their misguided faith that somehow this, breaking me down, making the tears flow, would produce for them an automatic outcome of “redemption”. It was as my father pounced on the word, “sentinel” (I had mistakenly pronounced it “setinnel” – a minor error of speech, under stress), that I knew that he was possessed by terrible unreason. The look in his eyes was triumphant, as if he had scored himself a little victory. “See!” he pronounced. “How can you be an intellectual?”

Needless to say, the memory of this, and other events, the hefty blows whilst I was down, stayed with me mentally. In another way, these events of the past represent a code to be cracked. More and more these days, they represent a series of unfortunate situations to be superceded. But, whatever insight I’ve achieved through the particular experience of being pressured by unyielding anti-intellectual Christians, gave me some small appreciation for what Rhodesian blacks might have endured under the system that was called “Rhodesia”.

I’m sure that I was expected to be thoroughly persuaded by my own lack of intellectual capacity by the ostensible “evidence” of my slurred or mispronounced expression of a word. I was not, of course – since sly political tricks of putting someone under duress, and then taking what they say, or how they manage to conduct themselves as evidence for how they’d be if they were not under duress, produce “evidence” which is ultimately only believed by the perpetrators themselves. Question: Where did my parents learn these dirty tricks? A further question: What possessed them to remain convinced by the results such dirty tricks produce?

Currently, I can offer only my hesitant answer, yet one which rings with as much truth as any truth I have encountered: “The Rhodesian propaganda system used such procedures of duress upon black dissidents, to make them look Unfit to Rule. The believing white public lapped up such “evidence” as it appeared to publically validate their elitist rule, for a while. After all, how can “they” run our country when “they can’t even speak English!” Uh-huh – We’re all “convinced”!